Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  He was too aggressive this time as well. He tried to chip the ball onto the green with a short, sharp stroke, but he hit it too hard and it dashed past the hole like a mouse chased by a cat, and rolled down through a bunker behind the green before coming to rest not far from me, where I was standing behind a tree watching him. I could hear him swearing. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. I picked up the ball, as he stalked round the green on his long legs and came in among the cypresses. I stepped forward and held the ball out on the palm of my hand.

  “Are you looking for this, Oscar?” I asked in English.

  “Fuck you, Lime,” he said. “You know you’re not allowed to touch the ball.”

  I threw it down at his feet.

  “Just take the shot from there,” shouted one of the other players.

  Oscar scrutinised me.

  “What the hell do you think you look like?” he said.

  “I ran into a couple of problems or three.”

  “Begun diluting the cola again have we? Well Peter?” he said. He knew me far too well.

  “There’s just something I’d like to ask you about,” I said.

  “Gloria will kill you.”

  “It won’t take up much of your time,” I said.

  “You don’t have to make an appointment with me,” he said amiably. “We could always have a drink together, just like the old days.”

  “We could indeed,” I answered.

  “Gloria will flay us alive,” he said. He turned round, took up his position and, without a practise swing pitched the ball effortlessly in a gentle arc, out onto the green where it came to rest just half a metre from the hole. He gave me a satisfied look, and stomped off to get his putter, basking in the other players’ praise for his fine stroke.

  Oscar settled up with his golfing friends, and after some painstaking arithmetic, he signed the scorecard and we went and sat at a table at the edge of the terrace. We had a beautiful view across the golf course, tinted red by the sun as the scorching day finally gave way to the mellow, pleasant evening warmth.

  The waiter came across to us and Oscar looked at me quizzically.

  “Two gin and tonics,” I said.

  “She’ll kill you,” he said.

  “It’s my business,” I said.

  “OK, Peter. You’re an adult. Who got you into that state?”

  I gave him a broad outline of what had happened, and a very brief sketch of my thoughts. I began to calm down and the restlessness in my body vanished as I drank the cool, fizzing drink with its tang of juniper and lemon. It was as if we had never been apart. It was hard to give up drinking; it was very easy to begin again. Oscar listened without too much interruption, other than to commend the efforts of our friends Tómas and his father and to curse the Irishmen.

  “I’ve said it before. Stop playing amateur sleuth. Come back to work. Listen to your inner voice. Listen to what Amelia would have said. She would have told you to pull yourself together, live your life and do what you’re good at, taking photographs,” he said when I’d finished.

  He was undoubtedly right, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  “I miss them terribly, Oscar,” I said.

  “They’re not coming back, Peter. I know that sounds brutal, but it’s not meant like that. I’ve got only your best interests at heart. Work your way out of it, my friend. Come back to us. We’re your friends and we miss you.”

  “There’s something I’ve got to straighten out first. Let’s just see the summer through.”

  “OK. Besides, we’re shutting down soon. It’s too hot and everyone’s away anyway. But we want you back. In good shape. As audacious as usual.”

  We sat there. The cicadas were singing and there was a pleasant, noisy chatter going on all around us. The Spanish are a vociferous people, but I liked that.

  “Have I ever spoken with you about a suitcase full of Lime’s photographs?” I asked after a while.

  “Gloria said something about it the other day. That you had set your best negatives and prints of some of your photographs aside. And that this was both good and not so good. Good because you’ve saved some fine photographs. Not so good because it weakens her action for damages. She’d intended to milk the insurance company for every last peseta they’ve squirrelled away for a rainy day.”

  “Have I ever talked to you about it?” I said.

  “You mean have you ever blabbed when pissed in the old days? Is that what you mean?” he said brutally.

  “Yes.”

  He leant across the table.

  “No. I heard about it for the first time the other day. You’ve talked about how you kept a box of old photographs in the loft, but I thought you meant photographs from your childhood. You know, the nostalgic shit we all lug around. But otherwise you’ve been damned orderly with your photographs. It’s always impressed me. Even when your life’s been total chaos, you’ve sorted, selected and catalogued your photographs in that fancy filing cabinet. Why do you ask?”

  “About my photographs?”

  “Yes, about your photographs.”

  “I think that’s where the answer lies.”

  “Peter. I don’t think there is an answer. Why torment yourself? Leave well alone. Come back to us. You’ve got many years to look forward to. We can’t bear seeing you so wretched.”

  “You’re a good friend, Oscar.”

  “Then listen to what I’m saying, damn it!”

  “OK. After the summer.”

  He looked like he was going to say more, but instead he sat back in his chair. And then, without really knowing where the idea came from, I said:

  “You knew the girl in the photograph, didn’t you?”

  He looked at me in surprise, but his eyes flickered.

  “Which girl?”

  “Cut it out, Oscar.”

  “I thought I’d seen her before, but I can’t place her. It was 30 years ago”

  “Why didn’t you say that you knew her?”

  “I wasn’t sure I did.”

  “But you do?”

  “I think so. At least, she reminds me of someone. But what the hell … all the chicks looked the same in those days. No make-up and hairy armpits. Big mouths, bloody fanatical. That’s just how it was back then, man!”

  “It’s still odd though, that we’d known the same woman before we even met each other. Don’t you think?”

  “Not really. We might have thought that we revolutionaries were in the majority, but we were really a small band who were always bumping into one another at demonstrations, meetings and god knows what else. We gossiped about each other just like all groups do. It wasn’t exactly completely by chance that you and I met. It would have been more surprising if we hadn’t. Both working for the press. Both regulars at the same bars. Both members of the same international press association in Madrid. What’s so unusual about it?”

  “Did you know the man in the photograph?” I asked.

  He shook his head and emptied his glass.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” he said, and I believed him. There was some truth in what he said. Over the years I had run into lots of people who I had known during the 1970s and who had been part of the revolutionary milieu which cut across all boundaries. Radical students from West Berlin’s Free University, American draft dodgers, writers and other budding young artists who wanted to try their luck in inexpensive Madrid which back then seemed to have it all, just as Prague was the place to be after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Major upheavals always attract the young and adventurous.

  “It’s just a weird coincidence, Peter,” he said, and looked at his watch. He asked if I would come home with him, so we could go out to dinner with Gloria, but I said no and refused a lift into the city. He walked away, exchanging greetings right and left, and I ordered another gin and tonic and drank it before getting the taxi to drive me to the Hotel Inglés in Calle Echégaray, just round the corner from Plaza Santa Ana. Maybe it was strange and masochisti
c to have chosen a hotel a few steps from the site of the fire, but it was a small family hotel with large rooms and I had often stayed there before I got my own flat. It was unassuming and it was in my neighbourhood, where I felt at home, and where I felt somehow that I had to make a fresh start if I was to prevent the desperate emptiness turning into a lethal depression that would lead to suicide.

  I got a double room for the cost of a single. I had often provided them with customers when friends or business associates wanted to spend a few days in Madrid at a good hotel for a reasonable price. Carlos in reception knew me and didn’t want to see my passport or identity card. Besides a double bed, there was a table and high-backed chair, a telephone, a minibar and a television. The room was decorated with faded wallpaper and reproductions of Goya and Picasso etchings from the blood-stained sand of the bullring. This was, after all, Madrid’s old bullfighting district. The bathroom was clean and spacious, like they used to be, and there was a pink bath tub. I put the suitcase on the floor just inside the door and threw my bag on the bed. No one knew where I was. Somehow I sensed that the suitcase was secure as long as it was in an almost public space.

  I left the hotel and walked to Suzuki’s institute just a few metres further along the narrow street. I knew that I was putting off the moment when I would have to look through my photographs, but I needed the old man’s soothing, consoling hands. The air was warm and young people were strolling along arm in arm in the middle of the street, as they had always done, on their way to copas and tapas in a city that seemed never to sleep.

  I removed my shoes and returned a bow to Suzuki’s youngest son.

  “My father has been expecting you, Lime-san,” he said in his impeccable Spanish.

  I undressed, admiring the colourful bruising on my chest, now going yellow and brown, had a shower, wrapped myself in a towel and lay down in the inner room. It was like a little piece of Japan in the middle of the capital of Spain. Thin shois decorated with calligraphic characters served as walls. The floor was covered with soft mats and there was a fragrance of jasmine. I could hear sounds of training from the big hall, the rasping sound of bare feet in attack, defence, feint, lunge, and the Japanese terms shouted with a Spanish accent when the blows registered. My bruised rib and stitched gash hurt, and a headache was tightening its grip at the nape of my neck.

  Suzuki came in, dressed in his white kimono. He bowed and I got up and bowed respectfully to him. He was a small, sinewy Japanese man of about 70, but he didn’t seem to have changed at all during the 25 years I had known him. His close-cropped hair was still jet black.

  “Welcome to my house, Lime-san,” he said in his slow, heavily accented Spanish.

  “Lie down and find peace in your soul. I have heard about your misfortune and I can see the pain in your eyes.”

  I lay on my stomach and his strong, yet gentle fingers began their mystical journey across my body. He squeezed, pressed, massaged and stroked, from my feet all the way up to my neck. It was as if he was pushing both the physical and mental pain forward, like a snow plough pushes snow, and the pain gradually drew together and gathered at the nape of my neck, disappearing into thin air as he massaged my neck firmly and lightly. At first I had difficulty relaxing, but eventually his magic worked its usual trick.

  “You have filled your body with poison again, Lime-san,” he said. “You have filled your soul with bad thoughts. You must seek your wa again. Otherwise you will be lost. You are full of evil spirits and negative thoughts. You must stop abusing your body and your soul. You must look into the very core of your soul again, even though you have lost the fixed point in your life. You must find a new one. You owe that to your family, Lime-san.”

  It might have been nothing more than an old man’s rambling, but it revitalised and relaxed me, both physically and mentally. His heavily accented Spanish had always had a strangely soothing effect on me. He had a deep, hoarse voice and I think he employed many of the methods hypnotists use. Whenever I was tense and on edge he succeeded in making me look into an empty, comfortable darkness where there was neither sorrow nor joy, only nothingness. It was better than taking pills. And for many years it had been better than alcohol.

  In a way it doesn’t really matter what helps, as long as it helps, I thought before I felt my headache break free and vanish into the subdued light in which the calligraphic characters seemed to come to life, and I slept like a little child.

  He let me sleep for an hour and then woke me with strong, sweet tea that we drank squatting opposite one another. I had borrowed a kimono and we sat in silence. His youngest son came in and greeted his father and then me with a respectful bow. He sat down on the floor and shared the tea with us. It was a signal that we could talk about everyday things. I hadn’t been there for a while, so I asked politely about their business and life in general. Both were going well. The institute was thriving and Suzuki had become a grandfather again, to a healthy little girl.

  I got dressed and they followed me out to the door where we bowed once more. It might be exaggerating to say that I felt like a new man, but I felt cleansed and the pain from my injuries had eased and the restlessness in my body and my mind had faded. I knew that this wouldn’t last, considering the state I was in, but the little peace that Suzuki had given me would last long enough to give me the courage to begin looking for the photographs which I knew existed, but which I really had no desire to see again.

  12

  I spent a couple of days in the hotel room with my mobile phone switched off. One day thinking exclusively about myself. One self-centred day when I took myself back to my childhood with my affectionate parents, which hadn’t been at all problematic, and then on to my very difficult adolescence. I often wondered whether my own restlessness was due to my parents’ stability. They were born, fell in love and died in a little village on the island of Fyn, and I think they met their deaths happy and contented with the quiet, bourgeois lives they had lived. Of course I can remember them, but the memories lose focus and become hazy. There’s a slightly remote father who goes to work. And a perpetually kind mother who stays at home and is there for you when you need her. It’s as if they were always old and yet ageless, and for a short period before they died very quickly, one after the other, it was as if they suddenly aged in front of my eyes and withered away within a couple of weeks, so that I no longer saw them with the eyes of a child.

  It was two days spent delving into myself, trying to rediscover the crucial events of my life. Going to the depths of my subconscious, where I was the prosecutor, defence counsel and judge. I slammed on the brakes when the pain became too intense, but for the first time in my 50 years, I spent hours trying to find out who I was and why I was that person. I didn’t find as many answers as I might have, but I found an understanding of my life, and came out of the process a more whole person. I went right in to the heart of my grief and while I couldn’t extinguish the despair, I managed to isolate it somehow, get it more under control.

  I was alone. I could laugh and cry without being seen. A good, low-key hotel is the most anonymous place in the world. I could pace up and down. I could sit cross-legged on the floor or on the bed. I could eat and drink when I wanted. I didn’t have to shower, I didn’t need to shave. I could sit in the heat of Madrid naked as a baby or just in my underwear. The only thing I couldn’t do was shout. The hotel didn’t have air conditioning, and if I had bellowed out my pain, the police would have turned up. I could hear sounds from the street, but the people walking along Calle Echégaray couldn’t hear me. My conversations with myself were mumbled under my breath, a dialogue between two parts of my mind trying to speak of the wordless.

  I ordered food a couple of times, but barely touched it, although I soon began emptying the bottles in the minibar. I didn’t get completely drunk, just mellow and sentimental as I delved into the suitcase and into my past. It was a bit like surfing the internet. I didn’t know what I was looking for, I just sifted randomly through the bits
of paper, old notebooks, half-finished diaries and photographs taken over the 40 years I had lived with a camera fixed in my hand as if it was an extension of my body. In a way it was a purging process. I faced up to the past and drew a line under it, so I could begin again, alone and without the family that had been my foundation for the past few, vital years. The sense of loss never left me but, as pictures and words surfaced and took me back to my childhood or adolescence, there were moments when I forgot Amelia and Maria Luisa.

  You can’t really remember who you were; you think you can, but there’s a fine line between memory and oblivion, and a photograph doesn’t help to unravel the thoughts and the feelings of a particular time. All that’s left is small, vibrating echoes from the past, like what I’m writing now – can I really recall how I felt, all alone in Hotel Inglés? Or do I just think I can remember the atmosphere – a strange euphoria mixed with deep melancholy in the knowledge that time passes and death approaches step by step, day by day.

  I thought about this as I took photograph after photograph out of the suitcase. It was all very organised. Photographs and notes were in chronological order. The photographs from my childhood were beginning to yellow – a picture of a stray dog, a tree I had climbed up to carve my initials at the very top of the trunk, my parents looking young and reckless in front of their first little Volkswagen. I had forgotten that they had been young once. That’s not how I remembered them. But there they stood with the world at their feet, a happy sight. An image of my mother hanging out washing on a clear, frosty winter’s day called to mind frozen trousers which stood up by themselves when they were brought in from the clothesline. Old-fashioned words and phrases surfaced: copper kettle and wash day, coalman, delivery boy, baker Bosse who brought round the bread in his little handcart. Here were the fishermen pulling a big wooden boat through the streets at Shrovetide, their familiar faces painted like clowns, trying to steal a kiss from the girls, who must put a coin in the fishermen’s collection boxes if they succeeded. The money went to widows whose husbands had been taken by the sea. I was born in the middle of the 20th century and have never really considered my lifetime as being anything other than modern, but in reminiscence the past becomes alarmingly old-fashioned. A little photograph with blurred background, thanks to the poor optics in my box camera, and my large, solemn handwriting describing the event on the back: Me on the beach, January 1958. Twelve-year-old Malene in her swimming costume and, four years later on the same beach, without any clothes on, the sun beating down across the photograph. A friend from my teenage days whose name I’d forgotten. The first photograph of Oscar and Gloria. They’re standing on the street with their arms round one another during the San Fermín Feria in Pamplona. Their white outfits are spotted with wine stains and Oscar is holding a wine skin over Gloria’s head as if he’s about to anoint her. I know they’re wearing red scarves round their necks, even though the photograph is black and white. Gloria has an untamed mane of black hair. And Oscar’s shoulder-length hair is curly and his beard is as wild and luxuriant as a Viking’s. It’s a glorious photograph, bursting with youth and vitality, filled with the belief that the world is our oyster and life will be good. A photograph full of joie de vivre, a declaration that dreams can be realised. It’s a photograph that symbolises our conviction that we were the first generation that could and would change the world for the better, that the old order would collapse and be replaced with love and equality. We were in Pamplona together for the first time and we ran in front of the bulls in the morning and partied at night with the Navarrese and the Basques and the thousands of tourists who spent seven days cheering and drinking in the capital of Navarre, a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in their pockets.